Course developers have varying backgrounds, training, financial resources and administrative resources; therefore, many different methods are used to design distance education courses and programs.
In the text, the authors describe the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) process as a standard for distance education course design.
Instructional Systems Design utilizes a planned cyclical approach to developing a distance education course or program. There are five stages that the design team will follow. These stages are
I have designed a course on the web, and although I do not classify it as a good site, as it is continuously under development and I have very limited resources financial, technical and administrative, I have chosen to critique it per the authors' twelve general design principles. I hope to make changes to the course per this critique. The site can be found by visiting the following site:
http://gwinfo.gwc.maricopa.edu/class/
Select the course called WRT100.
Good Structure: No
Each section does not contain an introduction. Learning objectives
are not clear at the beginning of each lesson.
Clear Objectives: Yes
The course curriculum has clear objectives and exam questions are based
directly on the course objectives, although these objectives are not made
available to the students as part of the course materials.
Small Units: Yes
The course content is broken down into individual lessons. Additionally,
the courses are presented in a logical order. A problem has arisen with
course in that the individual web pages for each lesson contain so many
graphics and animation files that they are too large and difficult to load
from off-campus computers.
Planned Participation :Yes
There are opportunities for the students and the instructor to communicate
via an on-line forum as well as email. Additionally, the instructor makes
site visits to remote sites to meet the students as a group.
Completeness: Yes
The course includes links to related on-line sites, visits with the
instructor, on-line graphics as well as hands-on field trips to provide
kinesthetic learning and applicability for the students.
Repetition: No
The course does not currently contain unit descriptions or summaries
or other areas for repetition. This is needed in the course.
Synthesis: No
The course does not currently contain summaries and does not provide
an opportunity for the units to be woven together. This is a definite problem
with the course and will be modified during the next course modification.
Stimulation :Yes
The program uses interaction, graphics and links to other sites in
order to keep the students motivated and stimulated to continue the course
work.
Variety: Yes
The course content is delivered via forums, on-line lecture with graphics
and animation, quizzes, hands-on field trips and face-to-face site visits
between the instructor and students.
Open-ended: Yes
The course contains several open-ended essay questions and assignments
as well as closed-ended multiple choice practice questions with which to
review and practice.
Feedback: Yes
Students receive regular feedback via email and through face-to-face
interaction during site meetings and field trips.
Continuous Evaluation: Yes
Being the designer and administrator of this course, I plan to regularly
evaluate this course based on student feedback and instructor feedback
as well as the skills learned in the course.
There are other instructional design models that can be utilized to
create good distance education programs. Links to several of them can be
found at
http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/idmodels.html
Gagne‚'s steps of instruction is a model that could be effectively used for developing distance education courses or programs. A summary of Gagn‚'s work can be found at http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/Stephen_Bostock/docs/atid.htm
Gagn‚ has identified the following nine steps in developing instruction:
This model uses three stages for effective design which are: